Delightfully Odd Music

Deep Earth return to the pages of 20JFG with a track from their split with Food Pyramid (who took the time to leave a lengthy comment on Monday’s post — both post and comment are well worth reading).

Kontraband teases as a synth led Miami Vice Balearic stormer, all mid-2000’s slo-disco swagger. Yet the Bladerunner synths that wash over tracts of the first third cast all that revivalist neon in a slightly odd glow. If anything the entire track crumbles in on itself for an extended breakdown (in both senses of the word), taking in some almost minimalist Mediterranean shuffles and, is that an ever so slightly funky bassline in there? That is before those mournful future noir synths surge back in on the back of a wonderfully deployed horn solo (thus playing into 20JFG’s secret love of horn sections in dance music — I’m looking at you Etienne Jaumet)

So, delightfully odd in a way that restores our faith in delightfully odd music. So kind of Finders Keepers in 7″ form or, more prosaically: not a million miles from Aeroplane‘s debut and the promise that held.

Another returning 20JFG shock-troops recaptures these pages, this time in the form of Lord Boyd. Taking in all the foreign lands he’s conquered visited, Lord Boyd’s remix Time Wharp‘s Cuspcake pulls in the early house synth obsession from UK Bass, the chopped RnB from, well, modern RnB. The original‘s chip-tune p-funk come blissed out end-of-level boss on a yacht (rock) made of cocaine…ness, is reshaped as something altogether more smooth. Wonderfully hyperactive while seeming to glide through a parallax scrolling night of two-stepping possibilities.

Lord Boyd also has a track on Egyptian Maraccas curated comp of remixes from which this next track by Ben Aqua is taken.

SNAP’s new-age-y Rave anthem Exterminate is made to look positively somnambulistic as Ben Aqua manages the same trick as Lord Boyd above: marshalling a feeling of hyperactivity while simultaneously creating that molasses slow narcotic haze that would be quite terrifying divorced from the vocals and drum programming. Something of the Weenknd’s mournful RnB drifts over the proceeding further dragging the feeling of speed in a dozen directions at once. Multiple tempo changes later, the effect is dizzying.